Hopefully it will be as far away from the speakers as possible to reduce the echo effect that you sometimes get from Teamspeak etc..I'll probably end up using a Bluetooth headset anyway, but it would be nice to have it work well on the get go

It depends on what you want to do- if you watch ebay for long enough you are sure to eventually pick up an old Pentium 4 laptop which meets your price requirements and will run windows and all the games windows runs, but it certainly won't be a portable and it will be much more fragile then the Pandora.

As it has been stated, the Pandora will probably not be able to run 486 and above compatible programs, meaning that you probably won't get half-life, but there will be plenty of other options when it comes to emulation, and with playstation emulation and probably N64 emulation you'll have many more options than the GP2X.

It comes down to you- do you want something that you can carry in your pocket that is convenient to take everywhere you go or do you want something that is fragile, has limited battery life, and is much more bulky, but has more power and runs windows?

It depends on what you want to do- if you watch ebay for long enough you are sure to eventually pick up an old Pentium 4 laptop which meets your price requirements and will run windows and all the games windows runs, but it certainly won't be a portable and it will be much more fragile then the Pandora.

As it has been stated, the Pandora will probably not be able to run 486 and above compatible programs, meaning that you probably won't get half-life, but there will be plenty of other options when it comes to emulation, and with playstation emulation and probably N64 emulation you'll have many more options than the GP2X.

It comes down to you- do you want something that you can carry in your pocket that is convenient to take everywhere you go or do you want something that is fragile, has limited battery life, and is much more bulky, but has more power and runs windows?

How about one of those Asus Eee 1000? or a Acer? Will those out perform generally? I don't care if it fits my pockets, just want it to fit into my backpack.

You could get a new netbook in Pandora's price range (EeePC etc). As small as they are, they've still got nothing on Pandora's portability. And no gaming controls built in, and probably not very good performance.

You could get a second hand standard-sized latop (15" screen). This would allow you to play your desired games, but has no gaming controls, and is less portable again than a netbook.

For products in Pandora's "portability" class, you'll be looking at UMPCs such as the WiBrain which run Windows. These are very expensive compared to Pandora though. And they still don't have gaming controls.

End of story, if you want price, small size, and dedicated gaming controls, Pandora is it. But if you want to run Windows games, it's not what you want.

[edit] Regarding emulation: Pandora already has PSX running at full speed, and then some. (And then some more). We don't know how N64 will go yet. I can't see a netbook handling those all that well though.

It really depends on what you want: if you want a laptop, get a laptop. If you want a powerful gadget. get the pandora.

For a good and cheap laptop, I can only recommend to get a hp nc8000 with an additional accumulator for the multi-bay. I have one and with my openSUSE + KDE4-Faktory-Install, it hast more the 7 hours of battery life (under workload). With Ubuntu, it has only 5 hours, but that is still a lot.

Get a laptop. The advantages Pandora has are the incredibly small size, much longer battery life, and built-in gaming controls -- but for everything else you state you want (playing Halo), you will be much better served with a laptop.

Hopefully it will be as far away from the speakers as possible to reduce the echo effect that you sometimes get from Teamspeak etc..I'll probably end up using a Bluetooth headset anyway, but it would be nice to have it work well on the get go

Your open source alternative to TeamSpeak is likely Mumble/Murmur. Likely a lot of work to convert to the Pandora though...

Hopefully it will be as far away from the speakers as possible to reduce the echo effect that you sometimes get from Teamspeak etc..I'll probably end up using a Bluetooth headset anyway, but it would be nice to have it work well on the get go

A bit off topic, but almost every echo effect I've encountered (be it Teamspeak, or any other voice chat program) was simply a sound card problem: the mixer was actually recording the the output it was producing in a declining feedback. If you're getting feedback, try a cheap pair of headphones: if the echo disappears, your mic is too sensitive for the speaker setup; otherwise it's a driver setup issue like I mentioned. Bring up the mixer and under the "record" settings, disable everything but microphone.

The microphone is up in the right hinge hump in between the 9 and 0 buttons. It can be used with the lid open or closed since it has the hole facing up and slightly in toward the user (somewhat like the power LED).

If you must go with a good inexpensive Netbook, you could try Acer Aspire ONE. XP version w/ 160GB HDD, 6 cell battery will go for $400. It plays HL on steam client, runs GTA3, and runs Emulators ei. N64 fairly well. Even runs F.E.A.R., which I think is amazing. If it runs that, I'm sure there is an endless supply of games it will play. I want to get one and a Pandora. I can take it school and to work. I love these gadgets. P.S. On Pandora, 480P videos and games will look amazing, correct?

Keyboard and mouse is a much better control setup for 3d FPS anyway. The "dedicated" gaming controls are better for the classic 2d (some 3d) games. Even though the Pandora can do the keyboard and mouse controls, the PC games that you would want to run won't work on the Pandora, and I doubt the screen will be large enough to really enjoy playing a FPS with the keyboard and mouse because you need to set the unit on a desk to get the best control.